


Peonies, Poppies, Roses, Rue

by tentacledicks



Category: Watch Dogs (Video Games)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, BDSM, Biting, Bloodplay, Brainwashing, But Also The Sexual Kind, Chronic Pain, Dehumanization, Dom/sub, Dubious Consent, Fae & Fairies, Flogging, Hurt/Comfort, Id Fic, Light Bondage, Marking, Masochism, Mind Control, Multi, Panic Attacks, Permanent Injury, Polyamory, Punishment, Rough Sex, Sadism, Torture, Vampires, Werewolves, Whipping, Whump, nonsexual bdsm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-13 04:46:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: There’s a lot of things that Blume doesn’t tell people about ctOS: how much it monitors, who they sell that data to, the ways it can influence people’s thinking, the flaws in its security. Having secrets is par for the course in this industry, but Blume takes it just a little bit further, is just a little bit more insistent when it comes to hiding all the things it doesn’t want the rest of the world to see. They’ve got reason to, because humanity isn’t ready for the dark heart of what Blume is hiding.The Vigilante nearly ripped the veil off when he blacked out Chicago and dumped the data out there for everyone to look at. It was luck more than anything that kept some of their darkest secrets hidden—luck, and the fact that they aren’t the only ones with something to hide. But either way, one thing is crystal clear.Aiden Pearce is too dangerous to leave alive.[HIATUS]





	1. Subject Five: 01_

**Author's Note:**

> So while No Exit is over there being a mmmmostly fluffy slice-of-life AU, I figure, why no go all in on the _opposite_ of that? This is definitely not going to be mood whiplash at _all_. Ideally, the two are going to be updated mostly concurrently, so if this isn’t your thing, don’t worry, No Exit is still going (and SotL is eventually going to get its next behemoth of a chapter uploaded.)
> 
> Mind the tags. All of them will be explicit in the text.

**January 13th, 2014, ??:??**

 

The cuffs around his wrists were padded, but there was no real comfort to be had in that fact. He yanked on them hard enough to feel his bones slip and grind against them, fighting to pull backwards. No matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t get the leverage to move, not with his wrists locked to the ground on either side of his knees in this forced kneeling position.

With a final agonizing yank that threatened to dislocate his shoulders, he gave up.

Around him the room was white and blinding, acryllic panels screwed into the wall with barely-visible seams, their plasticky lining gleaming under the fluorescent lights. The floor underneath him was blindingly white concrete, smoothed and sanded until it gleamed like glass. It was a tiny room, made artificially big by the wall of mirrors across from him, but the emptiness stretched on through it like a lie.

He was the small spot marring the cleanliness of the room, his pale skin ruddy with exertion, stubble and hair darker smears still, the cuffs around his wrists and the collar around his neck almost pitch black. Seeing himself bound down like this made him bare his teeth in a silent snarl and yank against the bonds once more. They could catch him, but they couldn’t _keep_ him.

He was not a goddamn toy. _He was not a goddamn toy_.

Less visible in the mirror but still aching under his skin were the rapidly healing bruises. On his knees, around his wrists, wrapped around his ribcage like a loving grip. Those had been broken, he remembered that—remembered the way they’d been crushed and cracked, the agony of feeling his ribs collapse into his lungs until it felt like he was drowning on dry land. One of his lungs had collapsed. He’d been choking on his own blood.

Just bruises, now. He tried to arch, swore loudly in the echoing silence of the blinding white room, and forced the bruises on his wrists to deepen. There was no explanation for that, but having them still was a small measure of normalcy.

The dog’s teeth had been too long for a normal dog. Too well groomed for a feral but too big and too wild for a security canine unit. Some kind of wolfdog, maybe. Definitely illegal in the Chicago city limits, he knew that much, but Umeni-Zulu must not have cared. Its teeth had shredded his arm into nothing more than pulped meat, tendons and muscle stringing out over the scraps of skin left behind. It had broken his arm the way it had broken his ribs and now there was no sign it had existed at all.

He wasn’t crazy. This room made him feel crazy, but he _wasn’t_. The dog had been real. His injuries had been real. The needle-prick stinging around his neck now was _real_ , and he focused on the realness of it and his bruised wrists to stay sane.

The soft click of a lock caught his attention, head snapping up as he pinpointed the sound in the mirrored wall. Suddenly his heartbeat was too loud, too heavy, drowning out his ability to hear the danger coming for him. His lips curled in another silent snarl as he leaned as far forward as he could, the lack of slack on his chains making that distance much shorter than he would like. Air hissed softly as a section of the mirrors shifted, the hidden door depressurizing as it opened and let in a wash of new smells—cleaner, plastics, the warm burn of electronics, the faint smell of perfume, and blood.

Before he could focus on that last one, the line of small burning points around his neck turned into a surge of stabbing pain, spikes extending out from the collar and burying themselves in the tender flesh of his throat. He choked on the pain, on the sudden welling of blood in his throat, then bent over with a barely audible scream when electricity fired through the new pins driven under his skin.

The pain was excruciating, blinding, his body jerking and seizing in its bonds. He could feel a tooth crack under the pressure of his clenched jaw, hands spasming as lighting chewed its way through his system. He choked on more than the pain this time, bile and saliva and blood welling up in his throat as the electricity finally ended. But the pain—oh, the pain didn’t end. The burning in his neck was agonizing, like needles that had been heated over a fire before being driven into him.

Cool, perfumed fingers pressed to his sweaty temple, and he shuddered as he tried to catch his breath. There was an aura of menace to the person standing over him, something not quite like decay hovering low under the delicate floral of their perfume.

“Has he survived his first full moon yet?” said a woman, her voice low and rich. It was the kind of voice men would pay to hear on phone lines and television spots. The voice of an actress, or a news reporter. With nothing more than her tone, she dragged fingers through his brain and those claws wanted him to _trust her_.

His heart was pounding, but it wasn’t with fear. It was with the rage and hatred of a chained beast, an overwhelming pressure that threatened to crack out of his fragile ribcage and launch itself at her like a wild animal. He couldn’t speak but it was because pure fury had locked his vocal cords entirely, pain feeding the anger until he could barely feel the pain anymore.

“Not yet,” said someone from behind the mirrors, their voice carrying through the dark portal the woman had come through. They sounded absent-minded and clinical, focused on a problem rather than the person trapped in this clean white room. “The next one is in two days, so we’re going to keep him in here until we know for sure he lives. Easier to clean.”

The woman hummed, her fingers dragging over his cheek. He met her cool gaze with his own, defiant and furious, then realized it was a grave mistake—the moment her hazel eyes caught his, he was trapped, body unmoving and unresponsive. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t turn his head and bite.

She smiled at him, wider than was polite, her canines far longer and far sharper than any person’s should be.

“He’ll live,” she purred, her low voice resonating through him with something like command. He hated her, hated her more than he’d hated anyone, and even lost in the depths of her eyes, his fingers managed to curl into fists. It made her laugh, her business suit shifting with the joy in it, silk blouse rising and falling over a false inhale.

Her fingers dipped lower, down to the edge of the collar, then below it. Blood ran, hot and sticky, underneath it and down his chest, pooling in the cup of his clavicle. She caught some on her fingers, lifted them to her mouth and flicked her tongue out to lick them clean.

The rapturous sigh she let out sent ice down his spine. “Oh yes. He’ll live. I believe we’ve found our first success here. Once the full moon is over, I want him transferred directly to the reeducation center.”

“Should we feed him before then?” the person behind the mirrors asked, sounding more puzzled than concerned.

She dragged her thumb over her lower lip, then finally broke the hypnotic trap of her stare and walked back towards the door. Her heels clicked on the concrete, the sound shifting as she stepped past the doorway and onto a different type of flooring entirely. Linoleum maybe.

“Don’t bother,” she said, turning to smile at him again as the door began to hiss shut. “Suffering builds character.”

The lock engaged. He was left with nothing but the white, white room, the burning pain of his collar, and the hateful glare of his reflection’s bright green eyes.


	2. Aiden Pearce: 01_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Character chapters, much like the audio logs in game, are going to be chronological. But, also like the audio logs in game, there’s no promise that the order they come in is chronological. It’s fun. I’m having fun.

**December 31st, 2013, 23:45**

 

Fifteen minutes until the ball drop. He leaned against the desks in the Bunker and watched the news feed in the top left corner, a small bowl of ramen steaming next to his keyboard. T-Bone wasn’t around; he’d stayed longer than Aiden had expected given everything they’d said to each other near the end of the affair with Damien, but that didn’t mean he would stay forever. The Bunker held nothing but bad memories for him. Sticking around in Chicago, for whatever reasons he had, didn’t mean staying here on this island.

It made the echoing building more lonely, though. When it had been full of Blume engineers, when all these shipping containers had been well used converted bedrooms instead of dusty storage, when this floor had been full of desks and computers plugged into the server rack as they learned how to become gods—it would have been full of life then. He could still feel the ghosts of them lingering, the dust of their presence gently floating in the corners of his vision. While he might know the names of three of them, the rest were a mystery—had the woman that replaced Ray worked here when she discovered Bellwether? What about the young man who’d helped rig the election for Rushmore?

Or had they worked from that open-concept Blume campus up in Pawnee, from desks with no barriers between them, a cafeteria mere feet away? Had the old engineers all rotted from the inside out like the Bunker had, caught up in the dreams that they wanted instead of the reality that they’d built? Ray had been kicked out before he could lose more than the twinkle in his eye, and Rose had been killed by Blume and Rushmore both. But Tobias...

Aiden thought that maybe Tobias was the real victim of all this. Maybe he was the real reflection of the Bunker too. There had to be a reason he’d kept his vigilant watch over the place when everyone else had left it behind.

He’d warned Aiden that this place would kill him, once. It had been the hysterical rambling of an addict at the time, but months later, with Clara dead, T-Bone gone, and his family out of reach, maybe Tobias had been right. Aiden didn’t even have Jordi or Damien anymore, the darker parts of him that he’d wanted to move past. One was dead, the other vanished, and either way, he felt the loss keenly. In the end, he had no one but himself to lean on.

“Five! Four! Three! Two! _One_!” the newscast washed over in static with the roar of the crowd, the ball dropping on the stroke of midnight. Aiden tugged his bowl of ramen a little closer, twisting noodles around his fork. New year, new him.

Yeah. Right.

The scrolling feed to his right lit up with a crime alert, one of ctOS’s prevention measures picking up the variables of a perfect storm. He’d thought, in the wake of the data dump and the blackout, that Chicago might move away from ctOS. New York City had been wary ever since the 2003 blackout after all, and DedSec had been fervent in their attempts to drive home the dangers. But in the end, convenience and false security won out. People felt safe with Blume’s watchful eye over them, and ctOS was safe as long as a maniac in a trenchcoat didn’t fuck with it—or so they said.

As the maniac in question, Aiden thought that view was a bit naive. It made his life a lot easier though, so he couldn’t complain about that. Blume’s interference in people’s lives had been T-Bone’s cause, and Clara’s. Never his.

Even after everything he’d done, everything he’d seen it enable, Aiden couldn’t view ctOS as anything more than a tool. If it weren’t Blume’s tool, it would be someone else’s. If it weren’t the city itself, it would be guns, or drugs, or old fashioned cash drops. Fixers had never needed ctOS to do their jobs, after all. There would always be bad men hanging around to make extra cash off of worse men.

He stood up, tossing the bowl of ramen into a trashcan. Scarf, hat, jacket—he dressed up as quickly as he could for the brutally cold winter air. The Bunker didn’t have much in the way of central air and heating, but its walls were thick enough that it stayed mildly chilled in all weather; with the server racks running at his back, it was damn near toasty in here as long as he wore a sweater. Aiden wasn’t looking forward to the weather outside.

Not much to be done for it, though. He’d tried to let his identity as the Vigilante slip away, had tried to fade back into anonymity and pure selfishness again, but something in him yearned for it. Aiden smoked, he drank, he took stimulants like they were candy, but none of those compared to the thrill of taking someone down and knowing his violence left gratitude and relief behind. Playing the hero was a drug stronger than any other, and he’d only lasted a few weeks before he was back to his old tricks.

And maybe that was for the best. At the time, he hadn’t considered the ramifications of killing Iraq and Lucky Quinn, too focused on Damien and the specter of revenge hanging over his shoulder, but the power vacuum had been something to fear anyways. The Viceroys had descended into vicious infighting, lieutenants splitting off into their own subunits, all of them vying for control of the Wards and Rossi-Fremont. There wasn’t a single one of them capable of running Iraq’s monopoly on information, which was their only saving grace—as long as they didn’t bother trying to be smart, they were easy to deal with. Drugs, arms, and women, those were all things the police could track easily enough, and Aiden easier still.

No, the ones that worried him were the Club. Niall Quinn had worked under his father of course, but he’d been mostly a nonentity before Aiden had burst onto the scene. Now that Dermot “Lucky” Quinn’s empire had passed on, he was busy quelling the small spurts of insurrection and regaining lost ground. Lucky hadn’t left all his eggs in Blume’s basket, but enough of them had been caught up in the data dump that the Club had lost a lot of its hold on the police and the politicians of Chicago.

Niall wasn’t happy about that. Aiden thought that he could learn to suck it up, and was more than happy to show his men that by proxy. If he could excise even a trace of Chicago’s underlying corruption, that would be enough.

He swung a leg over the seat of a racing bike, powering it on and blazing down the bridge where it crossed over the river. This particular gang was an offshoot of the Club, a few guys going independent with mixed results. Kidnapping young women from the financial district was a new way to bring in some income, but thus far Aiden had been there to stop it almost every time. Those few moments he’d been too late, he’d tried to arrange for a police or FBI sting instead.

No more Poppy Specials, he told himself. Keeping women like her out of this mess was the thing that kept him going now.

The alleyway the men were converging in was a popular cut through to a parking garage. Aiden parked just outside of it, pulling his scarf up over his mouth and his hat more firmly down on his head. This bike was stolen, like every other vehicle he’d driven since sending Nicky and Jacks off in his legally owned sedan—hopefully they’d known enough to switch cars, and he’d left her the money and the papers to do so.

He dragged his thoughts away from his sister before he could fall down that rabbit hole again and climbed off the bike, hands shoved in his pockets. This part of town had some people still out, celebrating the new year, and one more man in a bulky trenchcoat hunching into the wind wasn’t anything to comment on. The gangsters didn’t want him and didn’t bother acknowledging him between quietly shooting the shit, most of them tucked into dark alcoves out of sight from the main road.

Silently, Aiden counted them—three to the left, huddled around the back entrance to a closed business, four to the right, mostly hidden behind the bulk of a work van, two on either side of the parking garage entrance, near where a couple of dark SUVs sat running and waiting. Clean setup.

If ctOS hadn’t alerted him to their arrival, he’d worry about whether or not they already had a few girls, but they hadn’t been here for more than ten minutes. After a second, he tugged his phone out of his pocket and accessed the cameras over the alleyway entrance, rewinding through that chunk of time. Three other men had passed through unmolested, and a group of five women, drunk but loud, had made it through as well. No singles.

Before, when he’d been trying to mostly lay low, he might have waited for them to actually make a move. Better to be sure that they were actually planning on hurting someone before jumping the gun. These days? Fuck the lot of them. There wasn’t a single damn person in this alleyway that was innocent, Aiden included.

He marked the men on his phone, all nine of them, and passed into the parking garage. No one currently sitting in the SUVs, which took them out of the equation. Both men at the entrance were disparaging about his jacket, snickering about the Vigilante knockoff gear that had started to show up in the wake of his actions four months ago.

His fingers curled around the grip of his pistol, resting just above the trigger. Twelve in the clip, one in the chamber, suppressor already threaded over the barrel. The people celebrating out in the streets were loud enough to hide the sound of bullets hitting flesh, and these idiots wouldn’t know what hit them. Just in case, he readied the code to trigger a blackout, pulling it up on his phone as he started to turn into the parking garage.

“Fucking wannabes,” the guy to his left said and Aiden shot him before he could say anything else.

His buddy went down a half-second later, brains splattered across the cement pillar behind his head. The men in the alleyway hadn’t figured out that something was wrong yet, which gave Aiden a chance to duck behind the secure weight of concrete, the cooling body of one guard under his feet.

Four to the left, three to the right. The work van had alarms that were accessible through ctOS, so Aiden triggered those first. Their inaudible conversations came to a halt, all seven men reaching for their guns as they turned towards the source of the sound. None of them were smart enough to see if their friends had noticed it too. Perfect.

He took down two of them before they finally realized what was happening. The remaining five all put the van to their back, looking around wildly and trying to figure out where the shots were coming from—one started towards the entrance of the alleyway, and Aiden swung out of cover long enough to take him down before ducking back as bullets took chunks out of the concrete where his head had been a moment before. This was where the cameras in the alleyway came in handy, his view of their movement unimpeded by his little hiding spot here. The four remaining men crept down the alleyway, guns trained on the entrance to the parking garage.

“I don’t think so,” he whispered, triggering the work van alarms again. These guys were untrained idiots, and every single one of them jumped and turned towards the resurgence of sound, leaving their backs exposed.

Aiden shot one through the neck and the second right through the chest, leaving the man staggering for a few seconds before he fell to the ground. The other two whirled back around, shooting wildly at his hiding spot again. The car next to him started wailing, its alarm triggered by a bullet in its side, and Aiden winced as he leaned out and fired again—one shot went wide, but the second splattered through first guard’s head and his final bullet found a home in the last man’s eye.

Two bullets left. He waited, discordant car alarms continuing to scream in his ear, but no one else came down the alley. These guys must have been alone.

At his feet, a phone started to vibrate. Aiden glanced down, then did a quick check through the cameras around himself before reaching for it. He hacked into it right as it went to voicemail, listening intently for whoever the redacted caller was.

“Change of plans,” said a man in the message, his voice deep and crackling over the poor connection, “get your crew down to this location. That fucker Niall is talking up some operation he’s got in mind, and we’re going to make sure he can’t pull it off. Could be good money, depending on who we sell the goods to. You’ve got twenty minutes.”

A second later, an address came through via text. Aiden stood, putting it into his GPS before climbing in one of the idling SUVs. No better way to arrive than in the cars they’d left in, after all.

He paused for a second, looking down the alleyway at the mess of bodies spread across the slush and asphalt. Used to be, he’d call in cleaners and make sure most of this couldn’t be tied to him. Hell, he used to care whether or not the Vigilante had a reputation for justified violence rather than excessive force. None of these men had done anything to deserve execution, not in the eyes of the public.

He'd long since stopped caring. They were better off dead, and if Chicago didn’t appreciate having the Vigilante around to clean up the mess, then it could tell him that itself.

He pulled out on the road, creeping past some revellers bundled up against the cold, then turned north, following the directions on the GPS. This address was one he’d been to before, briefly, a few months earlier—at the time, the Club had been using it for storing some of the contraband they were moving. Aiden had been there to make an example of one of their lieutenants, possibly even the same one calling this meeting. The GPS wanted him down low, at the entrance that was undoubtedly going to be guarded, but he ignored it. There was a small loading area set about thirty feet up to supply some of the businesses facing the street, and that was a much better place for him to be.

There were a few Club men hanging around up there when Aiden crept past looking for street parking. No way to tell if they were Niall’s men or traitors. In the end, it didn’t matter much one way or another; he found a place to park and backtracked, carefully slotting bullets into his magazine before jamming it back into his pistol. Twelve in the clip, one in the chamber. Like clockwork.

Two near the edge of the dropoff, one patrolling closer to the street. He grabbed the patroller, arm tight around the man’s throat as Aiden choked him out before he could make any sound to warn his fellows. It was dark enough out that Aiden could just set the body up against a stack of trash bags and head in.

The first man fell under the hard tip of his tactical baton, the soft spots on his skull too fragile to stand up to the weight of Aiden’s blow. The second man didn’t even realize he was alone before Aiden was in front of him, breaking his arm and punching him in the throat hard enough that he stumbled back and fell. While he slowly choked to death on his own adam’s apple, Aiden crouched at the edge of the loading zone, squinting down into the alley below.

No snipers this time, like there had been when the Club was guarding their contraband. Other than the guards up here, they hadn’t positioned anyone vertically at all. Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Just killing everyone and leaving wasn’t good enough this time though. If Niall Quinn really was planning something—something big enough that his father’s rogue lieutenants were thinking of getting in on it just to undermine him—that was something Aiden needed to deal with. And that meant figuring out who here was loyal and who wasn’t, not to mention whatever Niall’s plan actually was.

He flipped through the cameras, trying to see if there was any outward indication who these guys belonged to. No luck though; like him, they were all wrapped up against the cold, and unlike the Viceroys, they weren’t in the habit of announcing their gang affiliation. Alright, well, that had been a pipedream anyways. If visuals weren’t good enough, he’d just have to start digging through their electronics.

Nothing worthwhile in the messages of the first few guys he looked at, but when he was halfway through the mundane texts of one in a group, Aiden picked up on the conversation between the man and the guys around him.

“He’s talking up being one of _those_ freaks,” the guard complained, unaware of the fact his phone was recording. “You know, like his dad was near the end there. And I tell him, look, where the hell did that get Lucky? So he fucking sends me here for this fucking setup.”

“You dumbass, what the hell did you think was gonna happen? You know how prickly he is about his father,” said one of the others without any sympathy.

“I’m just saying, Lucky Quinn starts fucking around with that shit and he dies. I’ve got a cousin in DedSec, you know? And he went all weird after he started, stopped going to church and started wearing pentagrams and shit. I just don’t see any point in getting involved with that freak shit.”

“Yeah, well, you gotta admit: if it weren’t for the Vigilante, Lucky and that kid Iraq would’ve had it good,” said a third, reluctantly. He chafed his hands before blowing on them, squinting out into the road as a car rolled past them.

“Iraq was even more of a freak. At least Lucky still went to church,” the first man grumbled.

“Only because he needed to keep his reputation clean, and everyone knew it gave him a good alibi if he needed it.” The second man checked his gun, then held out a hand for the gun of the first man, who traded him easily.

“I’m just saying. It’s fucking unnatural. Niall goes down that route, he’s gonna lose even more of the Club than he already has. He doesn’t have the balls to go toe to toe with Blume and there aren’t any other fucking witches willing to teach him. Just do what his dad did, stick to hiring the freaks instead of becoming one. It wasn’t until Lucky tried being a freak that it all went to shit.”

“Yeah, maybe he should’ve tried being a politician instead,” muttered the third, before straightening up and looking ready. “That’s the boss now. Don’t say any of that shit to him, man.”

With a frown, Aiden pulled out of the man’s phone. He hadn’t gotten anything real out of that conversation, but something about it unsettled him anyways. At least with Niall pulling up, he had a better source of information to access—there were firewalls around _his_ device, but Aiden had dealt with firewalls a thousand times before. Niall Quinn didn’t have shit all that could stop him.

Below him, the man himself climbed out of the car to talk with his boys gathered down there. His filing system in his phone was nonsensical and Aiden couldn’t be bothered to hunt for keywords, so he started remote downloading all of it to his servers back at the Bunker. It would be easier to go digging through it all there, where even if it wasn’t _warm_ , it was certainly a hell of a lot warmer.

The download was slow—possibly an indication of just how much there was packed into Niall’s phone—and he slowly crept around to hide behind an HVAC unit. As long as no one looked up, he’d probably be safe, but he liked to be even safer than that. No point in taking risks, not when he wanted that data in its fullest, without corruption. Rose Washington’s death had been a good lesson in how little things could change the shape of everything else before it.

While he was at it, he hacked the mic on Niall’s phone too. Just in case.

“—paying good money,” Niall said, hands shoved in his pockets. “Now, our guys who’ve been cutting and running, thinking we won’t find them? They’re wrong. Even if Blume won’t work with us yet, I’ve got eyes on some of these other hackers who have access to ctOS.”

DedSec, probably. Not that they were the only ones with access, Aiden and Damien had been proof of that, but his use of the system had been much more limited before Clara had opened his world. The difference was night and day after that.

“And I’ve heard the rumors—sure you have too. That’s all they fucking are is rumors. They’re just goddamn code junkies making shit up to sound cool. You know what’s real? What we’re gonna fucking do to this city once we’ve got control again. My dad was good at making money, but we’re gonna make so much more than that, boys.”

His download was at eighty percent. The sound of tires in the distance caught his attention, just faint enough that no one below had noticed it yet. Aiden drew his pistol again, fingers curled around the hard case of his phone as he ducked a little lower. Frankly, he’d be willing to let these assholes shoot it out down there, but there was no guarantee that no one would come for him anyways. Better to stay out of sight for now.

“First order of business is tightening up our supply lines. That’s what we’re doing here—some of those guys that turned their backs on us think they’re getting the drop on a big shipment. Kill ‘em here, dispose of the bodies, and figure out what they were running before they came this way. And don’t fuck it up.” On that note, Niall climbed back in his car, waving for the driver to pull out.

The download finished a second after the red brakelights went out, Niall’s car pulling out of the alleyway at speed. Aiden let out a breath he’d been holding, then shifted on his toes as the sound of cars _arriving_ grew much louder, two black SUVs blocking off one side of the alley while a few black sedans clustered at the other end. Niall’s men were ready for it though, and the sound of gunfire rang out as they began to unload on the cars trying to trap them in.

The crunch of snow under tires was the only warning he got before another car pulled into the loading zone, four men piling out of it. All of them but one went to the edge to start firing on the men below, while the last man had the good sense to stop and frown down at the bodies Aiden had left behind.

Since he was the smart one, he was also the one that Aiden shot.

One more gunshot, even muffled, didn’t stand out from the cacophony of gunfire. None of the three so much as turned around, too focused on trying to hunt down Niall’s ill-favored lieutenants. Aiden slipped out from behind the HVAC unit, keeping low in the hopes of avoiding being spotted. One of the men staggered back, bleeding, but neither of his companions glanced down at him.

The sound of sirens in the distance slowly ate into the sound of bullets hitting damn near everything down below. Swearing softly, Aiden bolted through the loading zone, running for half a block before slowing to a steady, ground-eating walk. Most of the cars on the side of the road were too expensive and too obvious to steal, and he wasn’t going to get caught in a Club vehicle, not even if it meant trying to just walk away from the flashing red and blue starting to smear across the building faces around him.

A few squad cars barrelled past him, followed by a much heftier police van. The streets up here were empty enough that he didn’t have a crowd to duck into, and no businesses were open, which meant if any of them got in into their heads to turn around—

But none of them did. Aiden walked away from the explosion of gang violence with no one the wiser, and eventually, he was able to find a beat up junker to steal and haul back to the Bunker. As long as no one realized he’d been there, he’d have all the time he needed to pick apart the data from Niall’s phone.

And maybe he’d get some answers to what the Club meant by ‘freaks’ accessing ctOS.


	3. Aiden Pearce: 02_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picture me tearing my hair out trying to figure out if I wanted to format chat windows (yes), whether it was worth pouring a lot of effort into (no), and whether it was vital to my CREATIVE VISION or not (why do I do this to myself.)
> 
> Aiden gets mauled by a 'dog' in this one. Warning for fairly explicit gore and violence towards an perceived-as-animal.

**January 12th, 2014, 22:02**

 

The backbone of ctOS wasn’t something he’d given much thought to, if he was honest. Most of Chicago didn’t have any idea how it ran, beyond the fact that it _did_ on most municipal devices and basic cellphones, but Aiden had always thought that _he’d_ known. After all, ctOS was something he used all the time; he’d built his facial recognition scrambler into the code of his phone, and accessed any number of things by breaking through the encryption on building access points. Even if he didn’t investigate it, he _knew_ it.

Or… so he’d generally thought, up until now.

The Bunker was where Ray Kenney and Tobias Frewer and Rose Washington had built the framework for the monster ctOS would become. Their work had been picked up by other engineers once Ray was fired, and ten years later, Aiden had broken into the place with a half-formed idea of using it. The ghosts of all the old Blume techs infested this place, but now he was thinking about how very literal that concept could be.

It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t possibly be true. And yet, digging through all the _old_ documentation, the things from back when T-Bone and Tobias had talked shit about each other and recorded it, the stuff from before Blume’s engineers had taken ctOS’s code and sanitized it—all of that, inexplicably, pointed to one thing.

Magic.

Which was stupid. Damien might have called them modern day magicians, but Aiden was cynical enough and realistic enough to know that was a bit of artifice. They weren’t anything more than washed up criminals cruising for a better score than robbing banks could ever give them, and the rest of the hacker underworld was worse. Geeks, nerds, theives, scammers, none of them were anything more impressive or inspirational than the base humans they really were.

And yet, all the same, Aiden found things from Rose Washington’s old notes that talked about ley lines and tying sympathetic energies into the framework of the system. He managed to dig up an old system’s diagram, obviously T-Bone’s from the crude doodles in the margins, that had runes and spells written in alongside the code. A little bit of extra work yielded a filing cabinet, packed to the sides with carefully compiled records, all in Tobias’s name, meeting minutes alongside networking ideas alongside scathing considerations about faery politics.

He wanted to scoff at it, to sneer at the mere concept of this stupid magic shit, but actually _looking_ at ctOS—really looking, looking with more than just an eye on how to utilize it—somehow drove the point home. The universal wireless access? It wasn’t tied into any of the routing protocols he knew, and the more he looked at the ones programmed in, the less they made sense. Where he broke through encryptions didn’t match up with how hacking his way through firewalls normally should. Aiden wiped a computer and air gapped it, just to test whether or not it behaved the same, and it didn’t. Without ctOS, it was normal. Once he gave ctOS access, it started to respond to what felt like his _thoughts_ instead of the lines of code he was putting in.

It was absurd and impossible and somehow, it was _real_. Aiden wasn’t sure how to process that, couldn’t tell if he was somehow being pranked. After all, Damien would have known, even if Aiden hadn’t. Hell, _Clara_ had to have known, hadn’t she? She’d given him the access, the hacks, the depth he’d never been able to manage on his own. There was no way she didn’t know.

There was no way for him to ask now, with her dead.

That, in the end, was the thing that hit him the hardest. Now, so late to the game, Aiden figured out that some of the double meanings in her words had been triple meanings, that she’d been looking for Ray Kenney as not just a master hacker but as a master _magician_ , that there’d been something more to _everything_ and he’d been so blind. So fucking blind. If he’d realized, would he have been able to save her?

If he’d realized, would she have trusted him enough to let him?

“Fuck,” he groaned, leaning back from his chair. The Bunker was silent and dark around him, the massive wall of screens turned off for the time being. Aiden had spent almost two weeks peeling apart ctOS in all its mad glory, and he could feel that time etched into the back of his eyeballs.

There was a headache threatening, and he probably deserved it. With another groan, Aiden pushed himself upright and headed for the miniature kitchenette he’d commandeered over the last couple months. It had a minifridge, a coffee machine, and a hotplate and that was all he really needed. Microwave might have been nice, but wasn’t essential.

For once, he didn’t bother with ramen. He pulled out a tiny, banged up pot and poured noodles and water into it, flipping the hot plate on high before leaning against the wall to wait. It’d be shitty mac n cheese, but it was still probably better for him than the salt bombs masquerading as quick meals. The Bunker wasn’t exactly the sort of place that got pizza delivery, so he’d been stuck figuring out things to eat on his own.

And magic couldn’t bring him a fucking pizza, apparently. That was one of the things that kept getting him—that whatever magic was built into ctOS broke all the rules while simultaneously holding to rules of its own. Rules that weren’t written down anywhere.

Oh, he had some things, sure. He understood now that the reason why he’d always had an easier time accessing networks with his phone instead of his laptop had nothing to do with the processing power of _either_ , it was a matter of familiarity. The more he used his phone, the more it synced to him, the easier it was for him to access the magic skeleton holding up the framework of ctOS’s code. Certain things he did a lot became easy as thought, while it took longer for him to find the proper widgets for exploits he rarely needed.

Widgets and apps were as good as spells, and spells were as good as command lines in a computer terminal. In a way, magic was just accessing the code of the universe—but it was written in a programming language he could barely grasp without the face of ctOS on it. So here he was, stuck trying to fumble his way through something that he half-understood, hoping he wasn’t about to make a critical error. Defalt had been one step ahead. Clara had been one step ahead. _T-Bone_ had been one step ahead. The only thing Aiden had in his favor now was the cussed determination that kept him going even after it all.

Iraq had been more of a genius than anyone ever suspected, even him. The more he ate into the magicked code of ctOS, the more Aiden realized that was true. While Lucky Quinn had been granted access, and DedSec had managed to steal it, Iraq had been the only person that _understood_ what that access meant. Impossible to see on the front, but looking over the data dump with new eyes, Aiden could see every spot where Iraq’s fingers had left their mark. Every spot where Iraq had proved that he was Ray Kenney’s equal, could have been amazing if his ambition and his intelligence hadn’t been fused into an intractable core of a man that wanted to _rule_.

If Aiden hadn’t come along, if Damien hadn’t insisted on finding the other hacker, if Quinn hadn’t ordered the hit, if, if, if—maybe, someone else might have put a stop to Iraq’s plans. Maybe.

Or maybe, if Aiden hadn’t ever had a reason to look at Rossi-Fremont, Iraq would have succeeded in toppling Lucky Quinn’s empire and seizing the reins from Blume. Quinn had started getting involved in the ‘freak shit’, as Niall’s men had said, and that meant he could read the writing on the wall just as well as Aiden could, months later and with the benefit of future knowledge. Had DedSec ever realized? Had _Blume_?

He gave his noodles a stir, testing how soft they were. Good enough. After flipping off the hotplate, Aiden dug out a half-gallon of milk and the cheese packet. No strainer, but he could pour most of the water down the sink with only minimal noodle loss, and then he was free to pour the milk and cheese in. Dinner of champions.

Iraq was dead, just like Clara, and there wasn’t any point in reflecting on either of them. Unless T-Bone decided to show his face again—no promises, because he’d been ass deep in personal projects in that little warehouse-turned-hideout of his—he didn’t have anyone to ask about this either. At least, no one he could trust.

But if trust wasn’t on the table…

Sitting down with his pot and a fork, Aiden frowned at the second desktop. Clara’s desktop, once. She’d had access to the DedSec IRC and their secure channels, and Aiden had been too grief-stricken to actually try and revoke any of it. The most he’d done was avoid turning it on, lest it give them access in return.

They trusted him about as much as he trusted them, which was to say not at all. But playing phone tag with T-Bone wasn’t Aiden’s idea of a good time, and if anyone understood how ctOS worked from the outside, it was DedSec. Aiden had full, exclusive access. They’d give up nearly anything for that.

He scraped another bite out of his pot, then reached over to boot the desktop up.

Here was the first test, for himself, out of the safety of his air gapped computer. If DedSec had ctOS figured out, it wouldn’t be pure code that gave access. So if Aiden could really get into their channels without issue, then he’d know for sure that he grasped this shit as much as anyone _could_ grasp it.

The pot was set to the side. Aiden’s fingers rested on the keyboard, and he breathed in slow and _concentrated_. It wasn’t just a matter of putting in the code, hitting the right keys, accessing the app at the right moment—it was a matter of wanting. Wanting the pipes to blow. Wanting access to those secure files. Wanting answers from someone who wasn’t blindsided by it all like he was.

A chat window popped up.

> `Dave04: what a surprise  
>  Dave04: seeing you here`

He hesitated, tempted for a second to check which name he was under, but hesitation could get him killed. Better to commit, and see whether Clara had chosen to use her original credentials here too.

> ` BadBoy17: I want to arrange a meet.  
>  BadBoy17: You know who I am. You know what I have.  
>  BadBoy17: I have questions. You have answers. Pick a location.`

There. Ball was in their court. He leaned back, grabbing his pot and carting it upstairs, scraping the remains out and dumping the rest in the small sink. There wasn’t anything like a disposal or a washing machine, but he’d get around to washing the pot eventually.

If DedSec agreed to a meeting, then he wasn’t going to go in blind or weaponless. While they hadn’t tried to kill him _yet_ , there wasn’t any promise that would continue to be true, and he was throwing down a pretty big gauntlet. Once they had the access he was promising, they might think he wasn’t worth keeping around.

When he went back downstairs, there was a message waiting for him with GPS coordinates. He shrugged into his jacket, pulled his cap down over his head, and slung his rifle over one shoulder. Wouldn’t hurt to make it obvious that he was coming armed. If DedSec wanted to get offended by it, that was their problem.

A mean, fast little car waited for him outside of the Bunker. He climbed into the driver’s seat and secured his phone in the cradle meant for exactly that purpose. Whoever’s car this had been, they’d used their phone almost as Aiden usually did. Worked in his favor now. It was always easier to drive when he wasn’t trying to keep an eye on it in his lap at the same time.

Up in the Loop, which made sense—DedSec operated more heavily in the business centers of Chicago than anywhere else—but Aiden still chafed at the possibility of being exposed. Now that he knew what he did about ctOS, he wondered who else could see through it. Not just hackers, but witches, wizards, whatever sort of child’s book fairytale ridiculousness. If he’d been taken down to the Wards or the docks, he could have carried his rifle openly. Up somewhere cop-happy civilians might be, even at this time of night, he had to be more circumspect. The Vigilante’s reputation was good, but it wasn’t _that_ good.

The request to meet ass-deep in an alleyway got his hackles up too. Aiden parked across the entrance of the alleyway, blocking off one avenue of attack, but it wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t ever be enough, not when there were two other entrances and any number of underground doors and fire exit ladders to funnel more attackers into the space. At least it was a little easier to be openly armed between the tall, suffocating walls of the buildings on either side of him. Chicago only felt closed in when he was walking into a gunfight.

It was a man waiting for him, based on the shape and size of him, not to mention the suit. Unlike Clara, who’d hidden in the shadows and worn her true face, this guy had a mask pulled on, DedSec’s anonymous emblem painted onto the front. No way to tell if he’d come from close by or already been waiting for some other kind of drop. Aiden wasn’t naive enough to think that DedSec only engaged in humanitarian efforts—they got their money from somewhere. They’d been willing to cut a deal with Iraq.

They were willing to cut a deal with him.

Still, just to be sure, he said, “Dave04?”

“In spirit, though I don’t intend to unmask myself,” the man replied, his voice low and muffled but not distorted by electronic interference. Either he wasn’t the spokesperson for the messages that got thrown up on various screens in the city, or he simply didn’t see the point in hiding his voice too.

Aiden’s profiler told him nothing. The hum of magic under his thumb told him even less, his grasp on ctOS’s inner workings still rudimentary and childish.

“Are you part of the Council of Daves?” he asked, not entirely sure why he was stalling for time. Better to get his questions out and leave, before the Dave could call in whatever reinforcements he was planning on calling. Something in the back of his head was screaming though, and he wanted to try and figure out what.

“I’m surprised you know that. Though maybe I shouldn’t be. BadBoy17 was a close friend of ours too.” Dave04 straightened up, pocketing his own phone. Without any view of his face, Aiden was left adrift. Hard to socially engineer someone who wasn’t giving any cues. That was probably the real reason for the mask.

“BadBoy17 didn’t tell me.” On the off-chance that Clara had hidden her identity, Aiden was loathe to reveal it. They had to know by now, of course, but it was an unwritten rule about hackers, and he owed her memory that much. “Figured it out from some of the communications from your lower members. Is there a reason you make them think you don’t exist?”

“It’s better for everyone that way,” he said cryptically, folding his hands behind his back. “You had questions. We have answers. Once we’ve cleared those up, we can discuss your particular form of payment.”

The feeling of wrongness deepened, but Aiden couldn’t back out now. Not when he was so close. “ctOS runs on a backbone of magic. We both know this. It’s how I used BadBoy17’s access to get in touch with you. And I’m beginning to think it’s how so many of _your_ apps can utilize the city’s mainframe without any issue. I know it’s not just code. I know it’s more than just spells. I need to know how you combine them both.”

“You didn’t know before now.” It wasn’t a question, though Dave04’s voice was faintly amazed.

“I didn’t.” Aiden’s mouth thinned, the stable ice under his feet rapidly cracking the longer he stood out on this frozen lake of a situation. He hadn’t realized how tenuous his position was, how little they’d known about him.

“Your refusal to let us set up a backdoor in ctOS makes more sense, knowing this. Unfortunately, Mr. Pearce, I can’t give you that information.” The man lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness, patently false just like the apologies that dripped from his lips.

“You said you would,” Aiden said, reaching for his rifle. The sound of tires on asphalt reached his ears too late, too many cars to think it was just one group of fixers closing in.

“I said nothing of the sort, Mr. Pearce.” He flickered, like a poorly rendered video feed, shape going blocky and vague. “You assumed. Allow me to give you one piece of information for free: you should never assume when it comes to magic.”

The rifle swung up, before Aiden even realized he was lifting it, firing straight through the ephemeral shape of Dave04. No flesh, no blood, no bone—he only flickered one last time, then disappeared, leaving a log with a bullet in it behind.

Fuck.

His car was blocked in behind him, so Aiden swung himself up towards an old electrical utility box on the side of a building. It was set up above the alleyway, over an access door, built into the brick and leaving a broad stretch of concrete for him. Good vantage point, bad hiding spot. Not that Aiden expected to have much luck hiding anyways.

Two cars blocking his in, three on the opposite end of the alley, two more around the sharp corner of a branching T between apartment buildings. If he was lucky—and Aiden did not feel lucky—there’d be some sort of way for him to break into one of the buildings and escape. But all the fire escapes were pulled up, all the windows too far for him to jump, and the only possible escape he could see was at least a ten-foot leap from his spot now. Impossible, without some kind of lead up and a bit of a height advantage.

Fine. He was killing his way out of this situation. Teach him to ever trust DedSec again. Whatever fixers they hired weren’t good enough to take him on, and it wasn’t like DedSec could really afford the best. Numbers didn’t make up for skill.

Except he could see the Blume Security patches on the jackets of some of the men spilling into the alleyways. It wasn’t possible that the Council of Daves had cut a deal with Blume, was it? They were as close to mortal enemies as Aiden had thought was possible. The Club, the Viceroys, fucking Damien, sure. But DedSec and Blume would _never_ work together. It just wasn’t possible.

One of the Blume Security men lifted his gun and called out Aiden’s position. No time to reflect on that. Time to get to work.

He flattened out on the concrete roof of the utility access, rifle butted up against his shoulder and kicking back into it as he fired. The discarded shells flew past his crooked elbow, one ricocheting back to nestle against Aiden’s cheek before he shook his head and dislodged it, leaving a scorch mark behind. He’d never been combat trained by the Club but his father had taken care of that years earlier, leaving him with the weight of knowledge that he could kill a man.

No matter who Aiden became in the future, he would always be able to kill a man. Two men. Four, seven, nine men, their body armor useless against the copper-jacketed slugs of pure steel he’d kept on hand. His phone was in his pocket, out of reach, but Aiden could feel the hum of ctOS under his skin anyways, the little warning signs he’d ignored. He wouldn’t ignore it, next time. If ctOS wanted to warn him, he’d listen.

“Okay, Chicago,” he whispered, popping a man’s skull like an ugly watermelon as he tried to come up on Aiden’s blind side, “let’s turn out the lights.”

Eager and willing, ctOS surged up and knocked out the power to the block. It was just like thumbing over the app on his phone, while being nothing like it at all—Aiden could _feel_ it, feel the way the breakers tripped and the electricity stopped flowing, the way ctOS faltered and faded until it wasn’t there anymore. Offline. No power.

He had thirty seconds to get out of here.

Aiden fired three more times, into the darkness, then swung himself down and unloaded the empty magazine to replace it with a new one. The loaded rifle he let fall out of his hands, its strap catching on his shoulder as he turned to run. Not towards his car, because they’d be watching for that, but the opposite direction. Even without ctOS, he could steal a car.

He didn’t hear the dog until it was on top of him, its paws silent on the asphalt until it was too late. It slammed into him like a fucking truck, snarling wildly as its teeth sunk into his arm, and Aiden couldn’t help a muted scream of pain when it shook its head and the bones snapped. His knees came up, trying to roll and kick it off, but it only released him for a second before coming back, fangs gleaming white even in the minimal light of the blacked out alley.

Even surprised and off his game, Aiden wasn’t going down without a fight. With his good arm, he managed to get the rifle up and in the way, its mouth closing around the metal of the barrel instead of his throat. It shook its head wildly again, trying to chuck the gun like a stick, but the strap kept it firmly attached to Aiden’s shoulder—not a good thing, when he felt something in it crunch, but that arm was already useless to him. The paws crushing his definitely cracked ribs were more of a concern.

He kneed the dog in the side, slamming his good fist into its nose, and shouted again when it managed to get under the rifle for a second. Knocking it away was too little, too late, pain searing bright along his nerves as the shredded mess of his sweater and his _skin_ came away in the dog’s teeth. ctOS was still black and dead, no access, and the Security guard who’d sicced the damn thing on him were either dead or hanging back while it mauled him.

Fuck the fucking dog. When it came at him again, Aiden managed to get the barrel of the rifle up against its neck, its fangs slicing across the vulnerable skin of his throat as he fired. And fired. And fired again when it went limp and fell off him, and fired as his hands shook and he bled all over his gun. And kept firing until he ran out of bullets, finger reflexively jerking on the trigger anyways when there was nothing else to shoot.

The dog wasn’t a dog anymore so much as it was a pulp of flesh, bone, and blood, copper casings littering the ground around them with the lead slugs buried in the pavement behind its corpse. Aiden wasn’t much better, when it came down to it. His left arm was numb and on fire simultaneously, bone shards sticking out white from the pulpy mess of his forearm. Even though the lights were coming back on, his chest was black in the darkness, muscle exposed under flaps of his skin and blood smeared across everything else.

He could taste blood on the back of his tongue, and his attempts to swallow it down made the hot, wet slide of it down his neck only worse. Gagging, he tried to drag himself away and couldn’t manage it, his good hand skidding over the rough asphalt and concrete as he tried to get a grip. Couldn’t even roll over to hide his wounds when the Blume Security survivors came rushing down the alleyway towards him.

Couldn’t feel ctOS humming anymore as the black rushed in instead.


End file.
